Alfonzo didn’t know which version of himself rang truer. He was a left-wing-trash alpaca. He was the son of a local and an immigrant, and in this he fit some archetype. His father, Luis, was a quintessential outer-borough animal. He never left his borough and proclaimed that theirs was the best city in the world. Alfonzo’s mother, Gina, had been born in the Andes. She and her parents had made the difficult journey from the Bolivian Altiplano to the city when she was very little. Both parents had been patriots and thinkers in their own ways. His mother, during her life, had venerated little things like getting the I VOTED sticker every few years. His father put great stock in home ownership. He felt that their home in Ozone Park was key to belonging. Luis had a square of grass of his own, and it was surrounded on all sides by layer upon layer of labor, immigration, history, and industry. Besides his lawn, Alfonzo’s father put all his faith in the acquisition and maintenance of a public-sector job with a good pension. This outsized ego mixed with a strong desire for safety, Alfonzo thought, was very Queens.

Alfonzo wanted something different than his parents: not status or land, but intellectual stimulation. He wanted to become Professor Velloso Faca, an intellectual powerhouse who laid bare class struggles and identity formation to undergrad flocks. He dreamed of writing incisive theoretical texts that managed to be both sophisticated and humorous. Alfonzo had devoted all these years to a dissertation that would tease out the myth of empire from the unwashed raw wool of reality. When he tried explaining this to Mitchell, his friend said it sounded muddled but brave.

Alfonzo’s dissertation was a text dedicated to the struggles of Vicugna pacos, his species. And all that stood between him and a PhD was a conclusion he could not write.

That morning just before waking, Alfonzo had had a dream. The dream was of a single sheet of paper bearing the words The End. For some reason it was this that stirred him to action after so many seasons of floundering. He decided that today he was going to take a bold action. Humming a prayer to the clouds, Alfonzo slid a disk into his machine. He created a new page. This page he would slot in at the end of the text but before his nosenotes and footnotes. This was the page he’d been avoiding, but he was done procrastinating.

On the blank page he wrote the following:

Conclusion:

The End.

And that was it, a bold action. Alfonzo clicked send. Through wires the file moved from processer to printer. The page emerged from the slot, and he checked it over. With that complete, he went back to the beginning. The rest of the text remained to be printed. He sent the full file TEXT.DIVERSION878 to the Aztek Howtek printer. The daisy wheel began to whir.